Which are the most abundant protist species in the world’s sunlit oceans, and what roles do they play in global marine ecology? We seek a motivated, curious PhD student to join our team to answer these questions, by isolating abundant, unknown protist species and transforming them into new model organisms to study ocean ecology and evolution. First, we will collect marine water samples, isolate novel target species, and characterize their cell biology, behavior, life history and interspecies interactions with time-lapse, fluorescence and electron microscopy. Next, we will sequence and assemble their genomes/transcriptomes in order to provide an initial glimpse of their metabolic potential. Finally, we will interrogate global metatranscriptomic data sets to build hypotheses about each new species’ ecological characteristics, and then test these hypotheses in our lab cultures, with the goal of describing how these globally abundant protists influence oceanic ecosystems. Along the way, we hope that discoveries we make on these currently unknown organisms will influence our understanding of eukaryotic evolution and diversity.

The BEAP Lab’s (https://www.beaplab.org) goal is to isolate, culture and subsequently characterize the cell biology, behavior and ecosystem relevance of the most abundant unknown protists on earth. Protists are single-celled and colonial microbial eukaryotes which, due to their size (generally between a few micrometers and a few hundred micrometers) are a critical part of the food webs in all of earth’s ecosystems. In addition, protists form the backbone of the eukaryotic tree of life, meaning that studies of protists inform our understanding of the evolution of eukaryotic cell biology, gene content and species diversity.

About the Institute of Evolutionary Biology: The Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE) is a joint Institute of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), located in Barcelona. IBE’s research is focused on the processes and mechanisms that generate biodiversity and on understanding the genetic basis of evolution. The IBE is part of the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB), a stimulating international research environment with state-of-the-art facilities.